in Vail
What We Have to Understand about Vail Forecasting Visitor Numbers
In an interview on KPCW with a Park City Planner about approving Vail’s new Canyons/PCMR Gondola, the planner noted that Vail said it would not increase the number of visitors with the Gondola. This apparently was one of the reasons it was approved with no increased need for parking. When we heard that, we couldn’t believe it. However now we know why.
We’ve gone back and listened to a few Vail Resorts Earnings calls. These are where Vail announces their financial results and answer questions from investment banks like Goldman Sachs. So, why don’t they think combining ski resorts, and making the largest ski resort in North America, will increase visitors? It’s because they don’t forecast the number of visitors (at least to outsiders). Not in Park City. Not in Colorado. No where. Their claim is that there is too much variability year to year to do that. Instead they forecast revenue.
Yet, if our leaders ask them questions like “will the gondola increase the number of visitors to Park City area resorts”? Then if Vail replies with something like “we can’t tell you that it will. It’s not something we look at. There could be more or less visitors.” Our leaders shouldn’t say, “Well Vail says there will be no more visitors, so we don’t need more parking.” That shows a complete lack of understanding of how Vail apparently operates.
Instead our leaders should say, “we understand you don’t forecast visitors so you don’t guarantee there will be more by connecting PCMR and Canyons, but we think there is a better than even chance this gondola will lead to more visitors and more homes being built. Because of that, we need additional traffic mitigation and parking.”
To do anything less is a compelte disservice to our community.
Driverless Car Makes Trip from San Francisco to New York
A Friend of the Park Rag sent us an article from the Salt Lake Tribune about a driverless car making a trip from San Francisco to New York. There is just more and more proof that this technology is getting ready for prime time.
If interested, here is the article.
in Schools
Park City Parents … Stanford is Now Free
Dreaming of your little Suzy going to the Harvard of the West? Or perhaps these days Harvard is the “Stanford of the East.” Well, we have good news for you. Stanford is now free, if your parents make less than $125,000 per year and have less than $300,000 in assets. We’re not sure what percentage of Park City students are left after those two qualifiers, but surely there has to be some.
Of course, Stanford takes only 5% of applicants — making it one of the toughest schools in America to get into (if not the toughest). Our guess is that will be even a smaller percentage next year.
So, if your parents are one of Park City’s “Poor” (we could hardly write that), you better get to work. We’d suggest curing cancer as part of your next PC Caps project. If you can’t manage that, at least there’s always Brown.
in City Council
At Least They Didn’t Pick the Spa Option
We were looking through the proposed itinerary for the City Council’s proposed trip to Whistler. City staff of course recommends that they go on the trip (their decision matrix could find no issue with the trip). However, that wasn’t the surprising thing. What’s surprising was the list of possible activities:
City staff recommended the bear viewing and ATV tours as part of the proposed schedule. Priceless.
If the Jordanelle Special Services District wasn’t in so much trouble, we’d bet they would have done the Jet Boating too, just to see if it was enough fun to warrant annexing Jordanelle Reservoir.
We’re glad it’s not our tax dollars.
in Schools
Is Our School’s Dual Immersion Program Like Pert Plus?
If you have kids in school, dual language immersion is probably a concept you love or hate. Dual language immersion (DLI) is a program where students spend half the day in English with one teacher and half the day with another teacher in a second language (French or Spanish). DLI has been a hot issue around Park City, as many parents have been upset that not all kids were able to participate into the program.
Yet we’ve always wondered, are you sacrificing either the language component or the educational component when you try to combine them. Much like we don’t trust a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner like Pert Plus, are we getting both the best French Teacher and the best Science teacher when they try to combine the two?
We were reminded of this yesterday when we listened to School Board member Moe Hickey tell a group of people that in New York City that all you had to do to become a teacher was sign your name on a piece of paper. His point was that there is a shortage of teachers and that is leading to unqualified teachers educating children. He then said that the same problem was headed to Utah. He did qualify his comment with, “not Park City though.”
Mr Hickey’s comments started us thinking about DLI. If it’s hard enough to get a competent teacher, how hard is it to get a competent teacher who is more than fluent in a foreign language, fluent in English, and knows a subject inside and out?
We don’t know the answer, but common sense tells us that it’s something to keep an eye on.
in Environment, Schools
EPA Results on Treasure Mountain School Soil Will be Released April 8th
We reached out to Park City School Superintendent, Dr Ember Conley, to receive a copy of the EPA test results of Treasure Mountain Junior High School Soil. The EPA tested the soil in December and DR Conley recently stated that levels of some contaminants were elevated. In subsequent discussions we have heard school district personnel state that there is no imminent danger to students.
Dr Conley responded that she would be on KPCW on April 7th to talk about the results and would release the results on April 8th.
in Schools
Our Hope for the School District to Relocate to the Triangle Parcel is Dead
A few months back we wrote a plea for the Park City School District to consider making a school campus on the east side of highway 40. We felt they should move the entire Kearns campus there, which would allow Park City to redo their entry corridor as they saw fit. People wrote us with great ideas about how the space vacated on Kearns could become artist in residence housing, open space, low income housing, condos…all sorts of things.
We noted the Triangle Parcel, a piece of land owned by Park City and Summit County (where you’ll often see alpacas), wasn’t in our district boundaries, but that it made so much sense for our schools that they should work out a deal with South Summit School District. The new campus could be made with expandability and shared services in mind. It could be designed with a transportation plan integrated into its design. Our students, teachers, and parents could have the best of everything — with 21st century education, placed at the forefront.
At tonight’s Master Planning School Board Meeting, School Board member Moe Hickey effectively said they would not be looking outside our school district boundaries to put a new school (i.e, the Triangle Parcel). Of course he said that people “keep talking about it” but they need to know it’s probably not going to happen. What do ordinary citizens know? Not much we guess.
So, while we are a little disheartened, we understand it. However, we hope those people in position to influence outcomes such as these understand it too. When they rebuild Treasure Mountain on Kearns Boulevard, and also move 9th grade into the High School, causing 400 extra cars on Kearns… all the while knowing that Park City Heights is coming online and adding 200 homes, which will further increase the traffic jam on 248, we will remember who made those decisions.
We’ll do our best to help everyone remember.
Perhaps we’re bitter. No, we’re definitely bitter. We thought this was a great opportunity to enable both our students and faculty to operate in a world class facility that could help regain the prominence our school district saw in the 2000’s.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. We wish them luck…but only because it’s our students’ futures at stake.
in Schools
Live Blog: Master Planning Committee Meeting
We live blogged tonight’s Park City School District Master Planning Committee meeting. This was the first meeting, of three, where citizens who wanted to be part of the process joined the committee.
There actually not a lot of meat here. Our impression was that citizens were hoping to provide more input. Perhaps that will change in the second and third meeting. Click below for the play-by-play.
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Bertha’s Big Bust and Why Even Though Mountain Accord May Want A Tunnel It May Not Be That Easy
The word tunnel has taken on a different connotation since the Mountain Accord came to town. Mention the word in your local coffee shop and we bet some voices will get raised. Yet, we haven’t heard much discussion over whether a tunnel is actually feasible. It seems that people assume that since the mining industry did it years ago, it’s no big deal. Yet just like going to the moon, where many people say we no longer have the technical capability to put a person on the moon, we wonder if digging a tunnel from Alta to Brighton to Park City would just take the snap of our fingers and a few million dollars.
Enter the tale of Big Bertha, Seattle’s $80 million tunnel drill that gave up digging after just 1,000 feet of her 9,000 foot mission. She now has to be craned out of her tunnel, 120 feet deep in the ground, one piece at a time, in order to be fixed. The tunnel was scheduled to take about 3 years and now looks like it will take at least 5 years to complete… and over $2 billion.
It appears she ran into trouble with type of the soil and rock she was devouring and she finally just gave up when her teeth clogged and her seals started to bust. The article describing her adventure is a great read. It just doesn’t deal with the tunnel but also talks about traffic flow, gargantuan projects, and urban planning. Some of the quotes, that seem to apply to our situation include:
“Megaprojects almost always fall short of their promises—costing too much, delivering underwhelming benefits, or both. Yet from the London-Paris Chunnel to Boston’s Big Dig, cities still fall for them, seduced by new technologies and the lure of the perfect fix. A mix of factors has given Seattle a particularly acute sense of angst.”
“Moon’s[a Seattle urban planner] coalition said Seattle should follow New Urbanist examples, such as Seoul, Milwaukee, and Portland, Ore., that replaced highways with smaller surface streets, public parks, and dedicated lanes for mass transit and biking. Instead of seeing gridlock, those places found car trips declined as people opted for other means of transport or changed their plans and didn’t travel as far.
“Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford’s Saïd School of Business, has followed Bertha from afar. His research on megaprojects has been cited by both backers and critics of the tunnel. Nine times out of 10, massive infrastructure jobs go over budget, he says. Tunnels on average cost 34 percent more than anticipated. No region is better at predicting costs, and estimates over the past century haven’t become more accurate, his data show.”
This isn’t to say that a 4-6 mile (as the crow flies) tunnel couldn’t be built here. However, now we now don’t take that outcome as given. It’s not just a question of should we. It’s also a question of could we. We still believe that most people don’t want the tunnel. Now, if we add on to that the by asking “could we even build it?” Then, “if we start to build it, how much more will it cost than we think” it just leads to an obvious answer.
Can we please just implement Zions Park style busing in the Cottonwoods and limit the number of riders per day up the canyons? There you go. Watershed preserved. That’s what this is all about … right? That should save us about $5 billion.
Please take a chance to read the article, Stuck in Seattle — The Aggravating Adventures of a Tunnel Drill, if you are interested.
Parkrag
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